Why you should experience The Oriental Mall in Milan, Italy.
The Oriental Mall is a resourceful shopping center where Sarpi's century-old Chinese commercial culture, Michele and Francesco Hu's Bocconi-era entrepreneurship, family investment spanning retail and food and a multi-floor combination of Asian groceries, restaurants, fashion and wellness converge inside Milan's first Chinese mall.
Set along Via Antonio Rosmini near Via Paolo Sarpi and just steps from Chiesa della Santissima Trinità, the surrounding blocks mark the northern side of Chinatown through pedestrian commerce, residential façades and the dense succession of Asian businesses extending outward from Sarpi's principal axis. Three public floors divide the present complex into distinct commercial layers, allowing a grocery market, small shops, a larger non-food store, restaurants and wellness spaces to occupy separate stages of the visit. Shopping moves easily between imported foods, household goods, clothing and small accessories before the upper levels shift attention toward Chinese cooking and hot pot. The result is a pragmatic Sarpi institution whose significance comes from concentrating several branches of Chinese-Milanese commerce under one roof more than a decade after the Hu family introduced the concept to the district.
What you should know about The Oriental Mall.
The Oriental Mall is best known for becoming Milan's first Chinese mall when the Hu family inaugurated it on July 23, 2013 inside the former OVS store on Via Paolo Sarpi. Twin brothers Michele and Francesco Hu conceived and developed the project after studying at Università Bocconi and working in insurance brokerage and financial intermediation. They assembled capital from several Chinese families established in Italy, including investors with experience in large-scale retail and restaurant businesses. The Jin family and Zheng Wei Yan brought Iper Hu into the project; Wu and Jiang Sen arrived from restaurant operations, and Cristophe and Stephan Hu took responsibility for the original Hu Food operation. The opening configuration occupied five levels, two below ground, with Hu Food covering 350 square meters and Iper Hu occupying about 2,500 square meters upstairs. Two supermarkets formed the initial retail anchors. Fashion, jewelry, electronics, toys, pastry, a bar and food counters filled the surrounding commercial areas, and the upper program was conceived around beauty treatments, traditional massage, tea and yoga. The Hu brothers were already considering further centers in Turin and Florence during the opening period, placing the Milan project inside a larger retail ambition. The current three-floor configuration covers 3,600 square meters and combines fifteen shops, two restaurants, a pastry shop, a large market and a wellness center, showing how the original five-level experiment consolidated into a substantial permanent presence on Sarpi.
Tang Food Market supplies the strongest food-shopping component, drawing on twenty-five years of Asian import-export experience and carrying 5,000 products across Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Thai, European and other cuisines. Its distribution operation extends across multiple Milan stores with thirty refrigerated delivery vans. Iper Hu Market occupies the first floor and shifts completely away from food through clothing, shoes, household goods, stationery, underwear and products for sport, school and pets. June Tai adds a hot-food counter where dumplings and spring rolls are made by hand, giving the mall a direct culinary counterpart to packaged grocery shopping. Miss Cake moves into Chinese pastry through egg tarts, steamed buns and ginger milk curd. The second floor changes register again through Made Chef's Chinese restaurant, Hot Spot's fondue-focused cooking and Moonlight wellness. These sharply separated offerings make the mall most rewarding as a vertical exploration of contemporary Chinese retail culture, moving from grocery discovery through general shopping into prepared food and specialist services.
How to fold The Oriental Mall into your trip.
The Oriental Mall works as the shopping anchor for a Sarpi route connecting Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri's Rationalist housing, Milan's railway-manufacturing history and the institutional development of Italian industrial design.
Begin at Casa Rustici, designed by Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri between 1933 and 1935 after the pair opened a Milan studio together in 1932. The difficult trapezoidal plot on Corso Sempione prompted two seven-story volumes joined by elevated walkways along the principal façade, creating one of the architects' five major Milanese apartment projects. A reinforced-concrete grid supports the composition, and the suspended connecting elements turn the gap between the buildings into an integral architectural feature. Continue to Fabbrica del Vapore, where Antonio Carminati, Giuseppe Pozzi and Carlo Toselli established a railway and tram workshop in 1899. The company employed 1,350 workers by 1919. Engineers D'Alòi and Cuccoli developed the model 1928 tram from the American Peter Witt type, and more than five hundred examples followed. Attilio Carminati later opposed Fascist pressure to redirect civilian production toward armaments; the company closed in 1935, leaving the industrial complex that now houses a municipal cultural center. Conclude at ADI Design Museum, home to the Compasso d'Oro collection and the institutional history surrounding Italy's foremost industrial-design prize. La Rinascente established the award in 1954 from an idea by Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli. Albe Steiner created its graphic symbol from Adalbert Goeringer's golden compass. ADI assumed organization in 1959, gained full ownership in 1967 and established the dedicated foundation in 2001; the collection now exceeds 2,300 awarded or honored projects. The progression moves from Terragni and Lingeri's Rationalist housing through Carminati Toselli's tram engineering into Ponti, Rosselli and Steiner's design institution, placing The Oriental Mall inside a western-central district shaped by successive experiments in architecture, manufacturing, commerce and design.
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